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Bulletin, April/May 2010

Schools of Information and Undergraduate Education

by Mary Lynn Rice-Lively, Guest Editor

Global economic challenges have yet to dampen the steady stream of students seeking a college or university degree from the United States. The Institute for Educational Sciences’ National Center for Education Statistics reports that enrollment in degree-granting institutions has grown 26 percent since 1996 with undergraduate student enrollment rising 25 percent between 1997 and 2007
[1]. In sum universities face the dual challenge of diminishing funding resources and increased student admissions applications.

According to Kevin McGarry’s 1997 analysis of the development of undergraduate programs in the United Kingdom
[2], graduate professional school began to emerge following World War II. A similar trend was seen in the United States with many schools of library science that were first established as undergraduate degree programs evolving into the graduate programs during the late 1940s and 1950s.

Today 12 of the 20 U.S. members of the ISchool Caucus offer an undergraduate degree, two schools offer a minor (Illinois and University of Texas), two (Michigan and UCLA) offer select undergraduate service courses but no minor, and two (Carnegie Mellon and Indiana’s LIS program) offer no undergraduate courses. (See Table 1 for a complete list of these schools.)

Table 1. ISchool Undergraduate Programs
Contributors to this issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology explore the development and evolution of two very different approaches to iSchool undergraduate programs (Florida State University and the University of Texas at Austin), reflect on pedagogical and technological innovations in teaching topics in information studies and look at today’s multitaskers – members of a generation who have grown up “digital”
[3].